And there are far more trees than researchers previously thought - more than 3 trillion

FAOEvery five years, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization issues its Forest Resources Assessment. The latest report finds that even has world population has increased and global economy has expanded, the overall rate of deforestation has slowed significantly since 1990. From the report:

Over the past 25 years forest area has changed from 4.1 billion ha to just under 4 billion ha, a decrease of 3.1 percent. the rate of global forest area change has slowed by more than 50 percent between 1990 and 2015 (table1). This change results from a combination of reduced forest conversion rates in some countries and ncreased forest area expansion in others. It appears that net forest area change has stabilized over the past decade. This is an important development given the fact that wood removals in 2011 are about 200 million cubic meters higher per year than in 1990 and human populations have grown during this period by about 37 percent.

The decrease in net forest loss rates in the tropics and subtropics, combined with stable or moderate increases in the temperate and boreal zones, suggests that the rate of forest loss will probably continue to decrease in coming years.

Below are charts listing the ten countries in which forests are expanding most and the ten that are losing the most.

FRA

FRA

So how many trees are there on the earth anyway? As the Washington Postreported last week, a new study in the journal Nature answers this question:

In a blockbuster study released Wednesday in Nature, a team of 38 scientists finds that the planet is home to 3.04 trillion trees, blowing away the previously estimate of 400 billion. That means, the researchers say, that there are 422 trees for every person on Earth.

However, in no way do the researchers consider this good news. The study also finds that there are 46 percent fewer trees on Earth than there were before humans started the lengthy, but recently accelerating, process of deforestation....

The study shows that trees are most prevalent in the tropics and subtropics – home to 1.39 trillion trees – but that boreal or northern forests contain another .74 trillion, and temperate forests contain .61 trillion. It also suggests, rather surprisingly, that boreal and tundra forests often have a greater tree density than tropical ones.

The Post article seems to imply that fewer trees is necessarily a "bad thing," but where would we humans put our farms and cities if all of the forest primeval remained?

Interestingly, the FAO forest assessment finds that the global rate of deforestation is decelerating, not accelerating.

The researchers in Nature believe that on net humans are cutting down 10 billion trees per year. At that rate it would take over 300 years to cut all of the world's forests down. For those worried about deforestation, the good news reported in my new book, The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century, is that humanity has likely reached peak farmland. As a consequence, forests around the world will be expanding by hundreds of millions of hectares over the next several decades.

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It's their moral duty to tell all the rest of us how bad we are. They'll happily drink the kool aid flavored sugar beverage after all of us evil planet-destroyers do. And if you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you...

I'm not sure about that. There best course of action would be to wonder out into the forest/jungle and let some wild creature (lion, tiger, bear) eat them. The circle of life. Blowing their brains out may end in a cremation and wasted feed material. Don't want to add to the carbon footprint.

The trees and the modern infrastructure and technology can peacefully exist side by side.

There's a documentary about Manaus on Netflix. It's an interesting watch. Sloths hanging off people's clotheslines. Big cats coming into people's back yard to check out what's for churrasco today, giant pythons in the road. They have an entire group of people who deal with this stuff on a daily basis. Sloth in your hammock? Big cat got your ribs again? Just make a call. No one freaking out. Freaking out is a USA thing.

1) The PKK were run for a long time by a Stalinist named Ocalan. Under his leadership they committed massacres of not only Turkish civilians, but Kurds who were willing to coexist with Turks.

2) After Ocalan was captured, the state, as an olive branch to the EU abolished the death penalty. This was not popular; there was a widespread belief that the Stalinist shit deserved nothing but the gallows.

3) After Ocalan's capture, there was a cease-fire of sorts; the PKK agreed to stop attacks within Turkey. The idea was that the Kurds would stick to Iraqi territory, and the Turks would leave them alone.

Attacks on Turkish soldiers are viewed differently in Turkey than attacks on American soldiers are in the US. In Turkey practically every male is drafted to serve in the army. Thus when a soldier is ambushed, people see it as something that can happen to their son, their brother, their cousin. There is no "ho hum, *they* volunteered", but rather a feeling that this is an attack on the country as a whole.

The PKK want the military incursion; they calculate that war with Turkey will winnow out the weaker Kurdish leadership, and only the most ruthless will survive. They also calculate that the west will eventually force Turkey to grant conesssions to the Kurds. My guess is that they expect that after a brutal insurgancy, the Turkish and Iraqi states will be forced to cede land to form Kurdistan, and that land will be ruled by the PKK.

The AKP (the islamist friendly guys running Turkey) are quite happy to oblige them. They feel that they can weaken the Kurds militarily, and then ISIS will sweep over them. The AKP are suckers.... they don't realize that ISIS means it when ISIS announces that they plan to include Asia Minor in their caliphate.

And the Obama admin, being buffoons, failed to nip this in the bud and are about to end up with 1 - 2 fewer allies in the region.

There's speculation that the recent dust up between the Kurds and Turkey was orchestrated by Erdogan so he wouldn't need to power share with a third party in the next election. He's been cracking down on newspapers and arresting journalists who raised this possibility.

The U.S. hasn't commented on his recent activities because we need him to counter ISIS.

No doubt their are some bad guys amongst the Kurds. But it looks very much like a quid pro quo between Obama and Erdogan.

I was assured that there would be no more forests by the year 2000. Therefore I call BS - the deforestation stopped when we cut down the last of the forests in 1999 and the Lorax high tailed it out of here.

I realize they're kids books, but Dr. Seuss' political messages are pretty terrible. The Lorax and The Butter Battle Book are obnoxiously simple in their assessment of environmentalism and the Cold War, respectively.

" It is interesting how low the earlier estimates for tree numbers were.'

Every single time environmentalists trot out a number, it almost always turns out to be off by order of magnitude. This shouldn't be surprising at all.

The last one that the media seemed to shrug off was the revelation that the ""Great Pacific Garbage Patch"" - a concentration of plastic garbage "Twice the size of texas" - .... was actually either non-existent... or, under *worst case scenarios*.... was at best....1% the size of texas...

....and even then....

....well, it turns out that the stuff they've been modeling as 'clogging the ocean'? Is being digested by micro-organisms. So maybe it doesn't exist at all? Whoops.

But hey! thats no reason to not apply the same idiotic modeling presumptions to *every other environmental issue!* Systems aren't that complex, really.

It wasn't just environmentalists with the wrong estimates on trees. Those were the estimates of forestry experts.

Seems like the garbage patch has been in the news again lately. The story from OSU is 4 years old and the other more recent. So I don't know what to believe (though I'd be more inclined to believe OSU). In any case, it doesn't seem like such a huge deal to me. The Pacific is a whole lot bigger than Texas.

The "debunking" matters nothing to the people promoting the bullshit. Greenpeace, for one, is still promoting the "Texas"-size benchmark, despite what they claim to be describing has changed subtly from "garbage"-patch...to a "vortex" (which is just saying, "if there were trash, this is where it would be...even though there's uh.... nothing there...")

In the last few years, the process of biological plastic degradation has gotten plenty of new evidence... and of course, the way any information is used by the enviros?...OMG PANIC

I was talking with a CAGW alarmist the other day, and he claimed that AGW was already causing a mass species extinction event. I let him explain how the consensus of science was that about ten thousand species go extinct every year. Then I asked him to name ten species that went extinct last year. Unable to name any, I asked for ten species that went extinct in the last ten years. One species in the past ten years? At that point, I wasn't asking for the entire list, but just 0.001% of what the scientific consensus claimed. Apparently one can be absolutely confident of mass species extinction without knowing a single species that has gone extinct.

From what I can see outside my window, there are enough trees in the PRM that we aren't going to run out of trees for a long time. In fact, around here, there isn't one square inch of earth that there's not a building, road, parking lot or other structure on, or that is not covered in water, that doesn't have a damn tree on it.

I would be willing to bet that by the time a society reaches stages 4 and 5 of population growth, that their forests increase. That, and as a society matures, it uses fewer natural resources, not more.